Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Cambridge IELTS 17 · 2026-10-30

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

The chart below gives information about how families in one country spent their weekly income in 1968 and in 2018.

Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

1968 and 2018: average weekly spending by families

Student answer (Band 5.5)

The bar graph illustrates the information about one country where families allocated their weekly income in two different year; 2018 and 1968 .

Overall, food was the most interested source of spend the money in 1968, whereas in 2018 people showed their interest in leisure noticeably.

In 1968, people spend their 35% of money in food which was the highest number of all source .The second prioritized ways of spending money were housing and clothing and footware .They showed same rate 10% simultaneously . The others ways of spending their income were under 10% such as fuel power, transport and leisure.

In 2018, families spend their least amount of money on both fuel and power and personal goods 4% respectively. However, leisure showed high interest 22% on investing money. Housing illustrates 19% rate of spending money. Transport and household goods showed 14% and 8% rate of expenses respectively from their weekly income .

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.5

You identify the main contrast accurately: food is the largest category in 1968, while leisure is highest in 2018. You also report several relevant figures, including food at 35%, leisure at 22%, and housing at 19%. However, the account is only partly complete: it does not clearly compare the two years across the categories, and some figures or trends are omitted. For example, clothing and footwear falls from 10% to 5%, while transport rises from 8% to 14%; these changes would strengthen the summary. The overview’s phrase “people showed their interest” is also unclear because the chart records spending, not interest. Select the most notable increases and decreases and compare them directly.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 6.0

The response has a clear overall arrangement: an introduction and overview are followed by separate paragraphs for 1968 and 2018. This makes the broad time-based progression easy to follow, and “Overall” and “However” help signal relationships between ideas. Some connections are less clear or mechanical, though. In the 1968 paragraph, “The others ways” introduces a list without explaining how those categories compare, and the final sentence groups several figures as “under 10%” rather than presenting them in a clear comparison. The 2018 paragraph also moves from the lowest categories to the highest without a consistent pattern. Organise each year’s details by notable highs, lows, and changes, and use linking phrases to make comparisons between years explicit.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

You use relevant task vocabulary such as “weekly income,” “allocated,” “rate,” and “expenses,” and the reader can generally understand which spending categories you mean. However, word choice and collocation are often inaccurate or repetitive. Phrases such as “the most interested source of spend the money,” “showed their interest,” and “investing money” do not naturally describe expenditure in a chart. “The others ways” and “fuel power” are also imprecise, while “footware” is misspelled. These choices sometimes make the intended comparison harder to understand, which limits precision. Build a small set of accurate chart-reporting expressions—such as “accounted for,” “spent on,” “rose,” and “fell”—and use the category labels consistently.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

You attempt both simple and more complex sentence forms, including the contrast in “Overall, food was … whereas …” and the sentence beginning “However.” The main information remains understandable, but errors in verb forms, articles, plurals, and sentence construction recur. For example, “families allocated … in two different year” needs a plural noun, and “people spend their 35%” has an incorrect verb form and possessive structure. In “The second prioritized ways … were housing and clothing,” the phrasing and agreement pattern are not controlled, while several sentences have missing punctuation or awkwardly placed percentages. Practise accurate past-tense reporting and complete sentence patterns, then check articles, plural forms, and punctuation when editing.

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